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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25273951">Two Lives and the Next</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisesandlilies/pseuds/irisesandlilies'>irisesandlilies</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hemlock Grove</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(not really but enough for these two), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood, Death, Fix-It, Happy Ending, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mutual Pining, Wuthering Heights References, roman’s love language is acting like heathcliff, they truly are so toxic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 08:27:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,276</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25273951</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisesandlilies/pseuds/irisesandlilies</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter secures Roman’s gaze, the same gaze that could enact any command. For a moment they examine each other’s souls, it doesn’t matter how it happens, because whatever happens, they face together.</p><p>The dream gave them the only piece of the puzzle they needed. Lying in a forest, engulfed in the earth, the upir entangled with the wolf.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Roman Godfrey/Peter Rumancek</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>29</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Two Lives and the Next</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Any Roman and Peter fans still out there?? I started writing this literally years ago and decided to piece it all together now. I’m not sure why, maybe with all the crazy shit happening I’ve been more fixated on characters and media from times in my life that felt more stable lol. Anyways......</p><p>unbeta’d, all mistakes are my own.</p><p>Warning for mentions of gore, death/suicide, implied underage drinking, smoking, vague sexual content/blood drinking and all the other weird shit in the show. </p><p>also, I've chosen not to mark this underage as nothing besides pining happens while they're underage.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>Roman’s First Life</p>
</div>They’re lying on their backs on the gravel road overlooking Peter’s trailer. The break in the trees presents a gleaming interpretation of the sky, the stars beam placid and bright. The blot of yellow from the moon spatters the landscape, bathing them in light just dim enough to hide the subtle admiration reflected in Roman’s eyes when he angles his head just slightly to catch the outline of Peter’s profile against the pavement.<p>Their arms brush with each minute movement and a sensation of burning radiates through Roman from the point contact. </p><p>He surveys the dead sky blanketing Hemlock Grove, the absence of planes and birds only quietly evident. </p><p>There’s a stretch when they exchange no words and Roman lights a cigarette to occupy his mind with something other than his thoughts, attempting to articulate themselves. </p><p>He passes the cigarette to Peter without prompt, watching as it warms his features orange. In the low glow, Roman can almost see the wolf lurking within Peter. </p><p>It’s ethereal in the quietest way, and Roman would never grow tired of searching for the predatory flare whispered across Peter’s face. </p><p>The wolf is so delicate in the most visceral way, it mystifies Roman, and for that, he adores it. </p><p>Peter turns to press his face against his own shoulder, watching Roman tentatively.</p><p>It thrills Roman in the most warped way, the idea that Peter, the wolf, could rip him apart, leaving a hollow husk of undressed bones. </p><p>Sometimes Roman wonders if he and Peter share more than dreams, there can be no dismissal of their peculiar connection. </p><p>Peter seems to unspool the thoughts from his head, when he asks, “Did you really think I could’ve killed that girl?” </p><p>Peter makes reference to their encounter in the park, the first words they’d exchanged, wearing a guise of hostility. </p><p>Roman’s mouth falls into a smirk, “No.” </p><p>Roman gestures for the cigarette, inhaling and exhaling a plume of smoke. </p><p>Roman isn’t expecting Peter to press the night in question any further, the pair isn’t much for words beyond stupid, witty banter and foolish battle plans, but Peter keeps his gaze cast on Roman. </p><p>“What?” Roman inquires, painting his words with a false tone of annoyance, returning the stoic stare. </p><p>Peter is watching him pensively, like he’s trying to connect the dots of Roman’s features, like the hard lines of his jaw and curvature of his nose explain something more than the cultivated beauty of an upir.   </p><p>“The thing with your eyes.”</p><p>“What thing?”</p><p>They both know. Peter knows better than anyone, Roman has divulged to Peter all the supernatural elements that have followed him since his broken childhood. </p><p>“Don’t bullshit me, man.” Peter clarifies, tired and indignant. </p><p>“Yeah.” Roman responds simply. </p><p>“You ever use it on me?” The way Peter asks is timid like he’s pondered the possibility repeatedly. </p><p>His inquiry pulls Roman back to a moment of loss, Peter’s words still rattling in Roman’s head. </p><p>
  <i>“It’s over.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“What are you talking about?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“This is over. We’re done.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Think about what you’re doing. You can’t walk away over a stupid thing like that. You can’t walk away...from this.” </i>
</p><p>
  <i>From us.</i>
</p><p>Instead of hurling weightless insults, he could’ve taken Peter’s arm, locked his gaze, and had him forever. <i>He could’ve.</i> Instead, he exercised restraint and dealt with the heartbreak and subsequent spiral of events. It was the most selfless thing Roman Godfrey had ever done. He wanted whatever he and Peter had to be real, not coerced or taken like everything else Roman had ever acquired. </p><p>But Roman has no way to articulate that to Peter, outside fumbled sentences and diverted gazes, so he settles for turning the cigarette over in his fingers and a nearly inaudible, “No.” </p><p>Peter nods like he could translate everything Roman left unsaid.</p><p>Roman shivers, angling himself slightly away from Peter, feeling suddenly exposed. There’s a thousand propositions and confessions lingering on the tip of Roman’s tongue that he can’t risk.</p><p>Roman’s been given everything and still left empty. He’d come to learn that there was nothing more cruel than saving all the love he could harbor, letting it saturate his soul, only to find that love unrequited by the person he’d assigned it to. </p><p>Roman had endured a lot of awful things, mostly on behalf of his mother, but Peter wasn’t far behind. </p><p>Roman should’ve hated him for that, but that inexplicable fervor only heightened. </p><p>He glances back cautiously to see Peter canvassing the sky with his eyes, lips curled into a lazy smile, like he was oblivious to the way that Roman was scratching and clawing, till he bled, for any sort of reciprocation. He isn’t. </p><p>
  <i>“We’re in this together, you and I.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Why do you need that to be true so badly?”</i>
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>Peter’s first life</p>
</div>Roman was the first person outside the circle of Peter’s kin that he allowed to meet the wolf.<p>The question is asked when he’s slumped in the warmly lit classroom, his book is closed and his mind drifting elsewhere, only bits of Brontë’s words floating idly to him as their teacher reads them aloud. </p><p>The crumpled ball of paper skids across his desk. </p><p>
  <i>Can I watch?</i>
</p><p>He keeps his eyes fixed ahead, refolding the tatter of paper as he feels Roman’s gaze settle on him.<br/>
A permeating gaze that strips Peter’s soul and laps up the mess left. Roman was good at pretending he was incapable, helpless, but never for a moment did he pretend that he couldn’t understand Peter better than Peter understood himself. </p><p>There's a slight quirk to Roman’s lips and an easy fixation of his eyes. Peter has never despised anything more than he despises being known by Roman.  </p><p>As Peter mulls over the scrawled question, considers the answer he already gave without opening his mouth, their teacher recites the words placed on the page, </p><p>
  <i>“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”</i>
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>—</p>
</div>That evening leaves Peter further exposed, there was nothing he could hide from Roman. Trying to hide something from Roman was like trying to hide something from his own soul. He could tuck a secret away in the highest place but Roman would still retrieve it with a reverent expression taking his face.<p>Roman was always stained scarlet, he was never white. Every time he got close to Peter he seemed to come away with a bit of Peter and in its place he left a spreading crimson blemish.</p><p>Peter was terrified that he would one day take the hue entirely, but even more afraid of losing Roman’s affections. </p><p>“Let me drive you home.” </p><p>Peter nods. </p><p>Peter’s trying to catch the color of Roman’s face under the dim glow of the front steps of the Godfrey home, he acquired a rosiness when he’d had too much to drink. Warm faced and glassy-eyed. </p><p>He hadn’t. His eyes held clarity and his face a characteristic pale. </p><p>Peter almost wished he had, he could dismiss the inflection of concern in Roman’s voice. Forget the longing written in the margins of his face. He still wishes he had mistaken the worship that shaped Roman’s face when he first saw the wolf. </p><p>Peter casts his gaze towards Roman’s hands, his right gathered at his side in a tight fist. Roman’s knuckles acquire a more severe pallor the longer Peter stands with his chest nearly pressing Roman’s in the mist sodden evening. </p><p>Peter turns his face up towards him, Roman exhales softly, lips slightly parted. Peter reaches out so swiftly and gently, his fingertips settle on Roman’s upper arm. </p><p>A quiet curiosity takes Roman’s face like he can’t place what Peter’s thinking, what he’s planning. </p><p>Roman’s eyes shift in a nearly imperceptible manner, only Peter could notice the way they darken, “Tell me to go away.”   </p><p>
  <i>I’d give you anything you want.</i>
</p><p>Roman doesn’t say that but Peter knows. </p><p>“No,” Peter says barely beyond a hum in his throat. </p><p>Roman nods. He knew Peter’s answer already. Peter can see in Roman’s wicked face that he understands just how much Peter revels in the way Roman corrupts him, paints him darker. He needs Peter’s corruption just as badly, <i>maybe more.</i></p><p>There’s a perverse joy Peter finds in keeping him so close. Roman’s tucked under his thumb. The most desperate things Roman’s ever done had been for him. Somehow the same could be said for Peter. </p><p>Peter continues to watch him, quietly longs to tangle his fingers in the gold stands at the nape of Roman’s neck and kiss the subtle frown from his mouth. </p><p>Peter’s gaze follows his thoughts to Roman’s lips, plush and familiar.</p><p>Roman fixes his palm across the touch gracing him, prying Peter’s fingers from his skin. He’s hunched around him, as though to reduce the extent he looms over Peter. </p><p>”Fuck off, Rumancek.” Romans says weakly, his tone failing to convey any semblance of real irritation.</p><p>It’s a plea.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>Roman’s Second Life</p>
</div>The world is ugly without the rosy shade Peter casts across Roman’s perception of the world.<p>When the Vargulf tragedy had first struck Hemlock Grove it was as though the sporadic whispers and violent impulses that plagued Roman, from the moment he crawled into his mother’s lap and watched his father’s blood inch further across the carpet, had been magnified. All his grief was heightened, Roman was living in a foreign world, feeling like a misshapen replica of himself, but Peter was static. Peter took every grotesque bit of Roman and made it his own.  </p><p>When Peter left Roman nothing but a ransacked trailer, the world shifts again. </p><p>It's <i>ugly.</i> It's so goddamn ugly.</p><p>There's nothing to warm the absence, his senses are so devoid.</p><p>Roman doesn't want to live in a world without Peter, without his anchor to sanity. </p><p>There’s no one to place his evils upon, no one to share his suffering. Roman refuses to take back his soul after it had found its home. </p><p>He’s nearly untethered and the final thread snaps on his eighteenth birthday.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>—</p>
</div>Roman can taste blood, a thick phantom pooling in his mouth.<p>He wretches and heaves a sob, begging Peter and Shelly’s name into the darkness of the forest lacking a horizon, a forest he will one day decompose in. It’s the meeting place of their dreams, where the pieces fall into place. It’s his place of avoidance, and he needs an escape so desperately now, as his mother stands with a sadistic prowess beside the bassinet. </p><p>His fingers scrape the scarlet stained hardwood, the rich earth floor. </p><p>He thrashes against the wind, against his fate, his predetermined future. He’s the fly caught so foolishly in the web of fate that his mother had spun for him. </p><p>He can’t fathom how badly he needs Peter, calls out to him and Shelly in his own tattered mind as blood drips from his nose and he scrambles desperately for purchase along the edge of stability. </p><p>Roman’s lungs are screeching, filling with red. His lungs are spilling but he can't drown. He hasn’t found air since he fell to his knees in that trailer. He can’t see, his vision tunneling towards a heaven he’ll never experience, and his hearing fading to a recital of Shelly’s instructions. </p><p>
  <i>“You must make your heart steel.”</i>
</p><p>Roman’s heart is seared with tumultuous regret from his first life, things done and undone. </p><p>He refuses to surrender to the spider. </p><p>It isn’t that piercingly blued eyed creature peering up at him, it isn’t that heinous woman, preemptively triumphant and smug, no, it’s Peter. Peter is his last thought as the blade tears through flesh and tendons.</p><p>Roman is born a second time in a cold sweat, launching upright as life is thrust into his body. </p><p>Peter is his first thought when his second life is breathed into his lungs. And somewhere deep within Roman, Peter had instilled the strength to pick his own corpse up off the floor.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>—</p>
</div>It’s a perversion Roman allows himself, shutting his eyes and crawling into a bed that feels foreign in his new body. Roman paints a mental image of Peter, his nostalgic sick memory places Peter on a pedestal so high that Roman bloodies his hands trying to scale it.<p>Roman tries to seek relief in sleep, clinging to the hope that the empty ache between his ribs will be forgotten behind closed eyelids. He’s wrong.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>—</p>
</div><i></i><div class="center">
  <p>There’s no more poetic way to die than to return to the earth that materialized you. The soil is so sweetly scented with blood, oozing into tree roots and staining leaves. The surrounding quiet is a luxury the two corpses would only understand in death. </p>
  <p>Roman Godfrey’s heart has been liberated from the confines of his chest, leaving a hollow void where the boy’s best attribute had once been. Soil spills into the opening, filling him in a way he’d so desperately longed for in his previous lives. </p>
  <p>His arms are full, cradling a beast of grace and mysticism. The black pelt frames another boy, sick in love, his own arms extending through the deft legs of the wolf to hold the other corpse in return. </p>
  <p>Neither souls had ever known a peace like this, an inevitable closure. They lie intertwined, like the roots surrounding them, winding around their limbs and apprehending their bones forever. </p>
  <p>Roman nor Peter had earned the privilege of demonstrating their bond in life, but now they were to rest together, in death, evermore.</p>
</div><div class="center">
  <p>—</p>
</div>When Roman wakes he’s ill with longing, dragging a wistful palm across the composition of his chest, imagining the crevasse of his heart.<div class="center">
  <p>Peter’s Second Life</p>
</div>It’s the ache in his skull that finally rouses Peter from the dream, on the furthest coast from Roman.<p>He sits up on the mattress and screws his eyes shut in opposition to the pain he can’t entirely contribute to his fierce hangover. </p><p>His head feels as though it’s made of the same lead weighing down his heart. He places his feet squarely on the floor, trying to anchor himself and shake off the fragments of the dream that followed him into waking hours. </p><p>It’s a useless endeavor. </p><p>He drags a hand across his face, an exasperated sigh escaping from between his fingers. </p><p>He can’t fight off the incredulous laughs that slip from him, exhaling his wild sorrow and anger in resigned snickering. He continues until thick torrents of mirth take his entire body. The laughter shaking his shoulders and seizing his lungs shifts easily into sobs, desperate and wretched wailing. </p><p>Even when he had fought to disentangle their souls, spindly, pale fingers reach out and capture his thoughts, his dreams. Peter couldn’t escape Roman Godfrey. He couldn’t survive Roman Godfrey. </p><p>The dream had shown them that Roman couldn’t survive Peter either. </p><p>He fumbles helplessly across the bedside table for a cigarette, sending the book from English class that he’d inexplicably kept sailing towards the floor. His collection of rings follow suit, clattering and fleeing in different directions across the scuffed hardwood. </p><p>He retrieves a loose smoke, trying to even the trembles that rack his entire frame enough that he can light it.</p><p>He tosses the lighter somewhere towards the rumpled sheets and twists just slightly, fixing his gaze on the sliver of the ocean he can see from the clouded window. </p><p>He sucks on the cigarette, it takes exponentially longer to finish without Roman.</p><p>The tide slam against the shore, arriving so suddenly and destroying everything in its path. When the waves are done overturning rocks and rifling sand, the limbs of the water reach out and steal the coastline, retreating back into the water with it. </p><p>As Peter watches the repetitive theft he wonders if Roman is as miserable as him. He knows Roman is as miserable as him. </p><p>If Romanis stole to sell, Peter had taken a part of Roman’s soul he could never barter.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>Their Final Life</p>
</div>Roman ghosts his lips across Peter’s collarbone, the warmth of his easy exhales are a contrast to the cold threatening to seep in from the town that repeatedly reminds them they’ve overstayed every possible welcome.<p>Roman’s offered few words, but his expression is pensive. His face mirrors the night they’d sought out the Vargulf, his hands clasped firmly around his weapon, it’s appearance absurd even when framed by someone as elegant as a Godfrey. His face is worried in a frown, it was a look to translate concentration. </p><p>If Peter has come to gather a working understanding of Roman, since that night they’d first spoken, painted hastily in the misty evening fringed with the aura of decay, it's that the mechanics of life and keeping up appearances are natural processes for the upir. He could smoke around a lopsided grin, present himself as the image he’s made the world come to expect just following instinctual memory, with the absence of thought. But the emotion, raw feeling that threatens his facade, that he’s taught himself to dismiss, is what is demanding his focus.</p><p>"What is it?" Peter asks as he brushes a stray strand from Roman’s eyes and folds it behind his ear. </p><p>Roman wipes Peter’s blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, and Peter catches his wrist. Roman flinches as Peter drags a thumb across the thick gnarled line that had ended Roman’s first life.  </p><p>Something in Peter whispers to turn away, unearthing the layers of Roman is a feat that no one could ever claim. But another voice is coaxing him, a voice that mimics Roman’s so sweetly, the same voice that had carried him across state lines back to Hemlock Grove. </p><p>The voice urges him to smooth the crease of Roman’s brow. Drags his thumb across the alabaster surface, like he could iron out the furrowed lines of eighteen years of grief. </p><p>Peter despises the admiration he can feel in every fiber of his being, saturating the marrow of his bones. He had never believed that his soul and the vessel carrying it were capable of such adoration, unconditional love. Never thought his soul could latch on so violently to another and become that soul. </p><p>Peter regards Roman at his most vulnerable state, body hung languidly across Peter’s, the wolf’s blood warm in his stomach. Roman tips his chin upwards and rests against the muffled staccato of Peter’s heartbeat. His eyes are more naked than his body, speaking to Peter in a language only he could decipher. </p><p>"Hm?" Roman feigns a quizzical expression.</p><p>Peter scoffs, "what's wrong?" </p><p>Roman pauses momentarily, dragging his forefinger mindlessly around the gouges of his teeth imprinted into Peter’s collarbone.</p><p>“<i>That</i> dream, I never saw how-” he swallows gruffly, “we die.” Roman pronounces the words so softly, deliberately.</p><p>Roman’s mother had decided his second life, but he was determined to dictate his final. Roman had never lived without a fight, in his first life fighting to maintain a crudely crafted character, and now actively fighting the creature he had made himself with his own razor.</p><p>He would allow for surrender in his final life for only one other person. </p><p>Peter identifies that same nagging curiosity. Peter doesn’t know how, but Peter expects it, Peter longs for it. </p><p>Peter secures Roman’s gaze, the same gaze that could enact any command. For a moment they examine each other’s souls, it doesn’t matter how it happens, because whatever happens, they face together.</p><p>The dream gave them the only piece of the puzzle they needed. Lying in a forest, engulfed in the earth, the upir entangled with the wolf. </p><p>
  <i>Roman found Peter in his first life, missed him in his second, and lay beside him for all eternity in his final.</i>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I guess this is what I would’ve preferred as an ending to their story. As much as I hated seasons 2 and 3, I think their ultimate fate was correct in that they would either die together or kill each other. They loved each other too intensely to survive that kind of love. So in that sense season 3 got it right, but this is my fix it because I just envisioned it differently. I guess I don’t really explain how they die in this story, but what’s important to me is that they die together. This is really a tale of how I saw their lives unfold in my head, in three acts. </p><p>the wuthering heights bit is referencing an actual canon scene in the show, they are really just like cathy and heathcliff. yikes.<br/>anyways, let me know how i’m doing in the comments.</p><p>thanks for reading!!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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